> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices.
It’s a better way to say it. For you and me it might be better to say “WebKit renderer”. But for a non programmer, calling out the parts they wrote themselves is more reassuring, and highlights all the ways other browsers have to spy on you.
This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that we haven't forked anything.
Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
> they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.
I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.
Other comments seem to say it's based on Webkit, but why not something like Mozilla Firefox? I stay as far away as I can from Chrome and Google, but Webkit doesn't seem like the answer. That being said, I may still try it.
A very long time ago, Mozilla decided it was too difficult to keep Firefox’s engine API stable and said it’s more important that we have developer velocity than we have other people releasing software based on our rendering engine.
A decade or so later they kinda backtracked on that stance with boot to gecko and FirefoxOS but it is my understanding that they never took that momentum to make gecko into something that can be used for electron like platforms or indeed a new browser.
Bottom line is that WebKit/blink gives you better website compatibility (because major parts of the web is only tested against chrome) and is easier to use as a library than trying to wrap something around Gecko.
I think this has been one of Mozilla’s worst decisions.
The "The Browser" episode from the Acquired podcast might shed some light on the reasons why. If one of the key figures in the development of Mozilla and JavaScript didn't choose it for his own new browser, why would anyone else? :(
As mentioned in that interview, Brave's biggest reason for switching away from Gecko was that they couldn't support Netflix DRM. Gecko-based browsers can support it today because Widevine works (see Librewolf).
It's worth noting that Brendan Eich is far from the most impartial party you could hear criticize Firefox. He used to be the CEO, and resigned after Mozilla employees discovered his political contributions.
This looks great! But I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out the bitwarden integration: I already have a bitwarden account (in fact, I run my own self-hosted server), and I can't figure out how to use it in this browser.
Is it just that the password autofill feature uses bitwarden under the hood, but you can't actually use a bitwarden account? If so, that should be mentioned/documented somewhere.
> But we understand some folks want to continue using third-party password management across browsers and devices. So, we’ve teamed up with Bitwarden, the accessible open-source password manager, in the first of what we hope to be several similar integrations. In the coming weeks, Bitwarden users will be able to activate this seamless two-way integration in their browser settings.
Some brief considerations regarding the UI, after some testing:
– It would be nice to be able to set the initial zoom level to pages or, at least, to remember the previous zoom level. I have to do it every time I open the same website.
– While any website is working on something (loading, for example), there's no indication of that. I ended up closing a tab by mistake while a process on the website was still active. This is something that Chrome does well, adding a loading icon to the tab.
– The text on the main search bar jumps abruptly from the center to the left when clicked. In Safari, there's a smooth animation there, which feels more natural.
– The contrast between the search field and its surroundings is very low. Again, in Safari, there's a fine line that helps with it.
It's a browser with a bunch of privacy features, just like Brave but with a more opinionated design and subtle differences. It caters to people who don't want to configure a thousand things before they use their browser, which is the only unique selling point of this that I'm aware of.
DDG isn't doing uBO level ad blocking like Brave does. It's just blocking common tracking domains and elements, so you don't get (much) cosmetic filtering and some ads will still show up. My local newspaper's site has grey boxes where the ads would be without content or DNS blocking. On YouTube, it can't block the ads unless you open in the "Duck Player" (a page where it embeds the video). It also doesn't support extensions.
That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice compromise between "save everything until you delete everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be fast and battery efficient like Safari.
In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser, Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has extensions including more password manager options, and has its own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are excellent and cross-platform.
It seems to be designed as a standalone "incognito" only browser. You can except certain sites from being routinely cleared from memory (fireproofing as they call it).
Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions from what I've seen.
It didn't always have a generic Chrome UA, if you go here[0] it had 'Brave' somewhere in the string, which you could fix by turning on fingerprinting prevention. Glad they fixed that. I don't want people to know I use Brave, although I'm sure there's ways to detect Brave with JS.
JSON.stringify is outputting the "own, enumerable" properties. The default properties of window.navigator aren't enumerable and/or come through the prototype chain.
Does uBlock Origin even exist for Safari? If not, then I imagine it won't exist for this browser either, since it's just a wrapper around a macOS-provided, Safari-/WebKit-based webview.
Looks like the answer is no, Safari is not supported.
> ..as of 2022, uBlock Origin’s extension is available for several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13.
Orion is another WebKit browser that makes WebExtensions installable via its own extensions API. It's not perfect but it's miles better than anything Safari has and allows for existing Firefox/Chrome extensions to be installed. It only supports MV2 and won't be affected by the MV3 changes in Chrome world.
If DDG wanted to they could replicate this work to allow for MV2 WebExtensions to be installed.
It used to, but the developer pulled it after extensions were moved to the App Store (requiring an Apple dev account and certification) and some other technical restrictions introduced in Safari 14 IIRC.
Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from the post:
* Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to study and block new tracking techniques faster.
* New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your recommendations, etc.)
* New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can be subject to more tracking).
* New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs, windows, sites, or everything.
* A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and sleek.
Duck player seems interesting to me. I use firefox containers to browse youtube and one of my pet peeves with safari is not being able to keep my google and youtube cookies separately.
As a geek, I pride myself in using all the browsers. I have the free time to try them out and each one has its own unique selling point and feature set, which I leverage. Firefox and Brave for privacy. Microsoft Edge for normie stuff. Chrome for using Google services. Tor Browser Bundle for dodging the NSA. Opera & Vivaldi, because they're super customizable and quirky. Then various apps on my phone like Vanadium, Brave, DuckDuckGo, vanilla Safari, Firefox Focus, etc
I have the DDG iOS app and there is an option to remove the flame animation. Never liked it. Too fancy and seems over the top when I just want a brand new temporary session.
I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized that I was still giving a company all of my search queries, and companies are eventually too greedy to trust. It's only a matter of time before DDG becomes the next Google, after hype for Google dies, and everyone knows DDG as that upcoming cool kid.
Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my physical server at home, that's a much better option for my privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in a single search?
If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
[1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com` into the browser's address bar
What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site
So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?
Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?
Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.
I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
and
"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results.
> If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.
Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.
The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.
> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices.
Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?
It’s a better way to say it. For you and me it might be better to say “WebKit renderer”. But for a non programmer, calling out the parts they wrote themselves is more reassuring, and highlights all the ways other browsers have to spy on you.
This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that we haven't forked anything.
So can you describe in a little detail on what exactly are you doing? I'm not sure if you have plans to open source the browser or not?
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For all practical purposes, yes.
Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
> they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.
WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.
I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and Blink available for wannabe browser makers.
Because it is a standard Apple API so less work to do.
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WebKit is vastly superior to Blink on Mac.
Other comments seem to say it's based on Webkit, but why not something like Mozilla Firefox? I stay as far away as I can from Chrome and Google, but Webkit doesn't seem like the answer. That being said, I may still try it.
A very long time ago, Mozilla decided it was too difficult to keep Firefox’s engine API stable and said it’s more important that we have developer velocity than we have other people releasing software based on our rendering engine.
A decade or so later they kinda backtracked on that stance with boot to gecko and FirefoxOS but it is my understanding that they never took that momentum to make gecko into something that can be used for electron like platforms or indeed a new browser.
Bottom line is that WebKit/blink gives you better website compatibility (because major parts of the web is only tested against chrome) and is easier to use as a library than trying to wrap something around Gecko.
I think this has been one of Mozilla’s worst decisions.
The "The Browser" episode from the Acquired podcast might shed some light on the reasons why. If one of the key figures in the development of Mozilla and JavaScript didn't choose it for his own new browser, why would anyone else? :(
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...
As mentioned in that interview, Brave's biggest reason for switching away from Gecko was that they couldn't support Netflix DRM. Gecko-based browsers can support it today because Widevine works (see Librewolf).
It's worth noting that Brendan Eich is far from the most impartial party you could hear criticize Firefox. He used to be the CEO, and resigned after Mozilla employees discovered his political contributions.
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This looks great! But I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out the bitwarden integration: I already have a bitwarden account (in fact, I run my own self-hosted server), and I can't figure out how to use it in this browser.
Is it just that the password autofill feature uses bitwarden under the hood, but you can't actually use a bitwarden account? If so, that should be mentioned/documented somewhere.
It isn't yet released.
> But we understand some folks want to continue using third-party password management across browsers and devices. So, we’ve teamed up with Bitwarden, the accessible open-source password manager, in the first of what we hope to be several similar integrations. In the coming weeks, Bitwarden users will be able to activate this seamless two-way integration in their browser settings.
Glad to see the DDG Browser on the Mac!
Some brief considerations regarding the UI, after some testing:
– It would be nice to be able to set the initial zoom level to pages or, at least, to remember the previous zoom level. I have to do it every time I open the same website.
– While any website is working on something (loading, for example), there's no indication of that. I ended up closing a tab by mistake while a process on the website was still active. This is something that Chrome does well, adding a loading icon to the tab.
– The text on the main search bar jumps abruptly from the center to the left when clicked. In Safari, there's a smooth animation there, which feels more natural.
– The contrast between the search field and its surroundings is very low. Again, in Safari, there's a fine line that helps with it.
Everytime you use an app instead of a web app you have to trust the author of the app not to permanently track you.
Use web apps wherevery you can and delete the cookies and web storage whenever it makes sense.
All apps should have a PWA[0] option. Crpytee[1] is the only service I know of that offers strictly a PWA. PWAs have less privileges and this is good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
[1] https://crypt.ee/download
How does that work for a web browser?
Luckily we have open source web browsers. Most apps aren't.
But this is a browser....
It's yet another app at the same time.
For those who know a lot more than I do, how does this compare to Brave?
It's not that great. Brave is ahead when it comes to privacy and features and does a lot of things differently.
Also the fact that their contract requires them to whitelist Microsoft trackers is something to be wary of.
https://brave.com/privacy-features/
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
It's a browser with a bunch of privacy features, just like Brave but with a more opinionated design and subtle differences. It caters to people who don't want to configure a thousand things before they use their browser, which is the only unique selling point of this that I'm aware of.
> Webkit-based browser [...]just like Brave
Brave for Mac is not Webkit-based. It is Blink and V8.
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DDG isn't doing uBO level ad blocking like Brave does. It's just blocking common tracking domains and elements, so you don't get (much) cosmetic filtering and some ads will still show up. My local newspaper's site has grey boxes where the ads would be without content or DNS blocking. On YouTube, it can't block the ads unless you open in the "Duck Player" (a page where it embeds the video). It also doesn't support extensions.
That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice compromise between "save everything until you delete everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be fast and battery efficient like Safari.
In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser, Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has extensions including more password manager options, and has its own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are excellent and cross-platform.
It seems to be designed as a standalone "incognito" only browser. You can except certain sites from being routinely cleared from memory (fireproofing as they call it).
Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions from what I've seen.
Too bad they don't show in the User Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Would love to show the amount of visitors in Simple Analytics dashboards. [1]
Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
[1] https://www.simpleanalyics.com
> Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
Only in the DDG iOS app the useragent adds a DuckDuckGo string appended to a generic Safari string. You can test here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
Brave does something similar. It just looks like a generic version of chrome
It didn't always have a generic Chrome UA, if you go here[0] it had 'Brave' somewhere in the string, which you could fix by turning on fingerprinting prevention. Glad they fixed that. I don't want people to know I use Brave, although I'm sure there's ways to detect Brave with JS.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
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They seem to set something on `window.navigator._duckduckgoloader_`
If you run `JSON.stringify(window.navigator)`, it only shows the _duckduckgoloader_ variable. Anybody knows why JSON.stringify behaves like that?
JSON.stringify is outputting the "own, enumerable" properties. The default properties of window.navigator aren't enumerable and/or come through the prototype chain.
The rules for JSON.stringify are actually pretty complicated: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
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Do they still allow Microsoft trackers?
So will uBlock Origin be "crippled" in this browser, like in Chrome/Chromium and Safari?
Does uBlock Origin even exist for Safari? If not, then I imagine it won't exist for this browser either, since it's just a wrapper around a macOS-provided, Safari-/WebKit-based webview.
Looks like the answer is no, Safari is not supported.
> ..as of 2022, uBlock Origin’s extension is available for several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13.
https://ublockorigin.com/
Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari - https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Apparently, the only WebKit-based browser that can run uBO is Orion browser (beta, Mac only).
https://browser.kagi.com/
Orion is another WebKit browser that makes WebExtensions installable via its own extensions API. It's not perfect but it's miles better than anything Safari has and allows for existing Firefox/Chrome extensions to be installed. It only supports MV2 and won't be affected by the MV3 changes in Chrome world.
If DDG wanted to they could replicate this work to allow for MV2 WebExtensions to be installed.
It does exist in Orion, which is also WebKit...: https://browser.kagi.com/
It used to, but the developer pulled it after extensions were moved to the App Store (requiring an Apple dev account and certification) and some other technical restrictions introduced in Safari 14 IIRC.
Is there a way to block Javascript? I couldn't find it on a quick tour through the preferences.
What is this, a browser? Why do I need a new browser?
Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from the post:
* Better web tracking protections: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g., embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to study and block new tracking techniques faster.
* New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your recommendations, etc.)
* New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can be subject to more tracking).
* New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs, windows, sites, or everything.
* Our Email Protection integrated natively: https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-duckduckgo....
* A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and sleek.
Duck Player
Duck player seems interesting to me. I use firefox containers to browse youtube and one of my pet peeves with safari is not being able to keep my google and youtube cookies separately.
As a geek, I pride myself in using all the browsers. I have the free time to try them out and each one has its own unique selling point and feature set, which I leverage. Firefox and Brave for privacy. Microsoft Edge for normie stuff. Chrome for using Google services. Tor Browser Bundle for dodging the NSA. Opera & Vivaldi, because they're super customizable and quirky. Then various apps on my phone like Vanadium, Brave, DuckDuckGo, vanilla Safari, Firefox Focus, etc
Why try anything new? Why not just keep using Netscape Navigator or IE6, or whatever works on a Commodore 64.
When do we get the Extensions feature?
I like the flame animation when clearing the browser history. Is that Lottie based animation?
I have the DDG iOS app and there is an option to remove the flame animation. Never liked it. Too fancy and seems over the top when I just want a brand new temporary session.
Settings > Fire button animation > None
Will this eat more battery than Chrome does?
Rough guess: no. It's based on WebKit so it should perform more similarly to Safari than Chrome.
I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized that I was still giving a company all of my search queries, and companies are eventually too greedy to trust. It's only a matter of time before DDG becomes the next Google, after hype for Google dies, and everyone knows DDG as that upcoming cool kid.
Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my physical server at home, that's a much better option for my privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in a single search?
If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
[1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com` into the browser's address bar
What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
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> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site
So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?
Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?
Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.
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> Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things
They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made your plans public previously based on your reaction to a political situation.
Hi, didn't expect to see you here.
I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.
I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
and
"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
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Thank you for this clarification!
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Could you share more about this please?
Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results.
> If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
* https://docs.searxng.org
** https://searx.space/
Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.
Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.
The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.